D.C. Locals' Long Wait For Hope: 'Chocolate City'

 Foggy Bottom 

LOCAL JOURNALIST ELLIE WALTON, after completing documentary film studies abroad in 2005, came home to find a city in transition. A development boom had improved the District economy but had also unleashed a surge of gentrification.

Moved by the shockwaves rippling through the social landscape, Walton was led to tell a D.C. story "beyond the monuments."

"Chocolate City," co-produced with British journalist Sam Wild, focuses on the residents of two Southeast neighborhoods uprooted to make way for new mixed-income housing on behalf of a revitalization plan called HOPE VI.

The program began in October 2001, and the residents of Arthur Capper and Carrollsburg public housing, the subject of the documentary, removed in 2003. But demolition had still not been finished.

"Most of the residents remain scattered throughout the city," Walton says. "Some have since left D.C. altogether."

Walton and Wild largely let the displaced convey their plights in their own voices. The picture that emerges is one of broken hearts and deflated spirits frustrated with a bureaucracy not wholly in control of its destiny.

"Chocolate City" only hints at the many larger contexts in which the conflict is couched, but don't mistake it for anything other than grassroots political action.

"We hope the film empowers people to become active members of their community," Walton says.

» GW Marvin Center, 800 21st St. NW; Thu., 8 p.m., free; 202-994-7470.(Foggy Bottom-GWU)

Written by Express contributor Johnathan Rickman
Photo courtesy Ellie Walton